Baidu spokesman Kaiser Kuo said he came up with the idea for Baidu Beat as a way of providing insights on hot trends in China.

A recent posting listed the top questions asked by Baidu users in 2010. The top entry was “What should I do if my girlfriend refuses to marry me because I don’t have an apartment under my name?”

“That particular question is very illustrative,” Kuo said. “It is something very much on the minds of Chinese people. It gets to a fundamental problem here in Chinese society. There is, to a certain extent, a lot of materialism. Women, who say they are being very pragmatic, simply won’t marry a man unless he actually owns an automobile or his own apartment. It’s not a renter’s market on the romance market these days.”